September 23, 2003
By Per Thomsen
Photo: Trains line up in Copenhagen's central train station after train delays Tuesday Sept. 23, 2003. A massive power outage knocked out power in all of eastern Denmark and southern Sweden Tuesday. (AP Photo/John McConnico)
COPENHAGEN, Sept 23 (Reuters) - A broad power blackout struck southern Sweden and eastern Denmark on Tuesday, leaving up to an estimated five million people without electricity and crippling industry, airports, trains and bridges.
Power went out in the early afternoon at stations including two nuclear plants. The national grids and utilities began restoring electricity within a few hours and by early evening most consumers were supplied again, officials said.
The blackout, called the worst in 20 years in Sweden and Denmark, follows a huge outage that left 50 million North Americans without power for up to two days and a shutdown which paralysed London for several hours, both last month.
Curt Lindqvist, an executive at Swedish power producer Sydkraft <EONG.DE>, said the blackout was the most extensive in Sweden since December 1983. "We do not know the reason," Lindqvist told Swedish public service SVT television news.
"Something has caused power producing facilities to be disconnected and when there is not enough production, the entire system shuts down," he said.
Director-General Jan Magnusson of Swedish grid Svenska Kraftnat said a combination of factors caused the outage.
"In this situation the cable to Germany was down due to maintenance and the cable to Poland was also down due to maintenance," Magnusson said. "This meant that southern Sweden was especially vulnerable right now," he said on SR radio news.
Production stopped at the 1,135-megawatt Oskarshamn nuclear station at 12:35 (1035 GMT), and a halt in exports of electricity from the eastern Denmark region of Zealand caused a shortage and then the blackout, Magnusson said.
Kraftnat officials said a storm had hit a power line, also contributing to sudden heavy pressure on the system.
Those events triggered outages on two units with capacity of over 1,800 megawatts at Sweden's Ringhals nuclear station.
The power outage may have hit four to five million consumers, including one to two million in Sweden and between two and three million in Denmark, officials estimated.
A spokesman for Danish grid operator Elkraft said that power had been restored to almost all customers in Denmark by shortly after 7 p.m. (1700 GMT). An official at Swedish utility Sydkraft, operator of the Oskarshamn plant, said power had been returned to most of southern Sweden even earlier.
Power was earlier cut in southern Sweden and throughout the Zealand island, where the Danish capital Copenhagen is located.
NO NUCLEAR DANGER
Swedish nuclear safety officials said the outages at the Oskarshamn and Ringhals nuclear stations posed no safety threat.
"The security systems there worked just as they should," Anders Jorle, chief spokesman at the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate, told Reuters. He said the nuclear units shut down as a safety measure if there were big imbalances in the electricity network and pressure in the network fell suddenly.
Nuclear power accounts for about half of Swedish electricity output.
Copenhagen airport resumed service after earlier closing. The trains started to move again, and the Oeresund Bridge linking Denmark to Sweden re-opened.
The economic impact of the outage was unclear. But some large industrial plants in southern Sweden, including at pulp producer Sodra Cell, packaging firm Tetra Pak and vehicles maker Scania, were halted, Sweden's TT news agency said.
(With additional reporting by Peter Starck and Anna Peltola in Stockholm and Birgitte Dyrekilde, Nils-Ole Heggland and the Copenhagen newsroom)
Copyright 2003, Reuters News Service
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